Jul 26 2010
Business Objects vs. SSRS, Which one is right for you?
This write up contains a high level investigation of the Business Intelligence solution offering from Microsoft (SQL Server Reporting Services or SSRS) and the offering from SAP, the Business Objects base reporting package (BOBJ). While BOBJ does have more options for reporting and presentation, from a basic report feature standpoint both of the tools offer similar functionality and offer the user a great deal of flexibility in the presentation of their data. The other difference between the two solutions that needs to be considered is the expense associated with the Total Cost of Ownership. While you will have similar costs in the requirements gathering, design, development, testing, and ongoing administration, there is a significant difference in the licensing cost of these products. While BOBJ charges by either named user or CPU, SSRS comes with SQL Server so there are no additional costs with adding a BI tool set.
SQL Server and Sharepoint offer a quality BI solution, which meets basic architectural principles and business requirements. Because of Microsoft’s desire to establish itself in the BI space, it offers the BI components with a license to SQL Server. The lack of flashy, AJAX style reporting features (which are often shown in demos of BOBJ) may limit the business’s interest in SQL Server. Additionally, BOBJ’s reporting, ad hoc queries, dashboard, data visualization capabilities are key strengths of the SAP BOBJ product suite and are among top rated BI tools.
When considering the total cost of ownership, a company must consider the individual components that make up this expense. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comes from the High Level Business Requirements, Software Selection Process, Software Installation, Detailed Requirements, Design, Development, System and User Acceptance Testing, Production Software Licenses, the ongoing Maintenance of the solution. While many of these costs would be similar across the two platforms, a company needs to assess the differences in development time, and ongoing maintenance and understand which tool their personnel and IT infrastructure can support. Specific costs and return on investments are highly dependent on company’s specific situations and deployment choices. From our specific client exposure, mid-market companies do not opt for BOBJ, and we find that SQL Server is more prevalent. An SSRS solution will often be lower cost from a licensing perspective as all components are included with a SQL Server license. However, SSRS requires a developer to build their reports, where BOBJ supports an end business user self-service model. So long term technical support and development costs could actually be lower with BOBJ.
Because many companies already own SQL Server licenses within their infrastructure, the ease and low cost benefits of implementation may be too good to pass up. However, companies either without SQL Server in house or requiring heavily visual reports accessible to business users or self-service access to information with minimal IT support may want to implement BOBJ as their BI stack.
Jul 23 2010
Content Migration: High-Level Planning
To read the introduction to this blog series, click... Content Migration for Enterprise Portals: Almost as much fun as moving
“How much stuff do we have? How should we estimate that?”
“Should we just get a U-Haul and move ourselves, or do we need a professional carrier?”
“How long will it be between boxing up our belongings and being able to unpack them? What do we need access to during that period?”
These are just a few of the many questions that must be answered as you decide how to execute a move. Each has a parallel encountered during the initial stages of content migration planning.
Jul 23 2010
Content Migration for Enterprise Portals: Almost as fun as moving
I recently lived the joy of a multi-step interstate move that included professional packing, multiple trucks, and a month of storage between moving out and moving in. As my wife and I continue to wade through the remnants of unpacking, I’ve taken some time to look back and contemplate what we might have done differently to make it a more pleasant and efficient process. (NB: Our movers, Hilldrup Moving & Storage, were excellent and I highly recommend them. Even still, I doubt many will argue with this universal point: moving stinks.) While pondering the lessons we learned, it dawned on me how the moving process can serve as a useful analogy for a similarly intimidating challenge in the enterprise portal realm: content migration.
Jul 22 2010
HelloWorld Using JSF 2 And CDI
In this blog I'm going to go over the steps to get a simple HelloWorld web-app up and running on JBoss 6 using JSF 2 and CDI. Background information and full documentation for the technologies used can be found at the Java EE 6 home page and Weld documentation site.
Jul 21 2010
Transactions, Part 2 - Writing Data Reliably
Programming With Transactional Systems
Commit and Rollback
Transactions either commit or rollback. Until a transaction is committed, it is assumed none of the work it has done is saved. Once a commit signal is issued by the application (either through an API call, or by a container), this work is actually performed by the transaction processing engine that's being used. If for some reason the commit fails due to an error scenario, or some other runtime exception occurs, we assume that the integrity of the transaction has been compromised and the transaction rolls back, removing any work done up to that point. When a rollback occurs, the transaction must be resubmitted.